A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is usually an online network, connecting you to a variety of people with whom you exchange information with in order to learn and spread knowledge. Personally, the networks in which I partake in on a regular basis consist of Reddit, Facebook, Letsrun, and dyestatcal. Reddit is a very popular and growing website in which online users can vote up (up-vote) or down vote material and information on different threads/topics. I consider Facebook less of a PLN because while learning can take place, it's more of a personal tool for keeping up with the lives of friends and family members. Both Letsrun and dyestatcal have message boards which I read regularly and participate in discussion and debate about cross country and track and field. Twitter, and Diigo, while I don't use them that often, (diigo is awesome and it's only a matter of time before I fully incorporate it into my everyday internet experience) are excellent examples of PLN's in which hundreds of thousands of people can intermingle and share information. My PLN will help me greatly as an educator. While I'm currently not an educator yet, I know that someday soon I will be in front of a classroom full of kids, and that I'll be responsible for what they learn and what they take away from my class each and every day. My PLN will help me because if I have any problems or any questions, I will be able to easily find solutions and answers from people whom I follow on any one of my networks. Dyestatcal and letsrun are only two websites (there are many more that I know of) that I can turn to in order to get up to date news on whats taking place in the running world, and I know that I can turn to these websites for help when I'm coaching full-time.
I still have yet to really jump into the twitter community. I think the more I'm forced to use it, the better understanding I'll have of it. The people in my network outside of my professor and classmates that I chose to follow are former VP Al Gore, the Library of Congress, Philip Defranco (host of one of the most watched YouTube news channels), some guy named Tarzana Alec who went to UC Berkeley in 1966 and seems like an interesting guy, and a graduate student at Stanford university named Cameron Blevins. So I decided to participate in an educational chat today, Wednesday, March 28th at 2pm EST (11am here), but it seems as if I am the only one involved in the chat at the moment. Following this link: http://www.cybraryman.com/chats.html#WEDNESDAYS, I joined #historychat because I'm interested in seeing what information people have to offer, and after all it is my major. After twenty minutes, I was still the only person involved in the chat. I clicked on the hash-tag #historyteacher, and while it's not a live chat, there were more recent posts of people providing information relevant to history teachers. Overall the experience wasn't a disappointing one, and I learned that some chats aren't as popular as others, but that through searching around a little bit, I could find my way to other similar networks.
Diigo for those of you that don't know, Diigo is an excellent tool in which you can highlight relevant information you find on the internet, and bookmark and categorize that information to your liking. I personally am using it for my research paper in my Seminar in African history, and it's proving to be a great tool for researching. I'm currently following six people, one being my professor. The other five are frequent users involved in sharing and categorizing information they find interesting and relevant. The people I chose to follow can be viewed by clicking on the Diigo Tag Role located on this blog. I chose to follow these five people because they're involved heavily in this tool and they post relevant information pertaining to educational technology, including topics such as internet safety, Twitter, and YouTube. I've tagged 3 different links with the tag "PLN". I've tagged a website that has an A-Z listing of Educational Twitter Hashtags. This link is both relevant and important to have because it links me to so many different educational twitter feed on almost every topic imaginable. I've also tagged two different blogs whose purposes are to educate viewers on what PLNs are, and how they can be important, all the while providing links and videos discussing relevant material.
I went to The Educator's PLN website and viewed the video embedded below. In this TED video, Kevin Allocca who works for YouTube discusses why and how videos go viral. It is both informative and humorous and shows us just how rapidly changing our world can be. In this day and age, anybody can become a star, you just show something interesting and unique. He poses the question "What does it mean?" Between Taste-makers (such as Daniel Tosh or Jimmy Kimmel)and creative participating communities, this new media is driven by the audience who views it. He makes a bold statement that media is changing, and that these characteristics will define the entertainment of the future.
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